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Hey at least the lights are still on.

Here I was expecting a highly experimental, potentially revolutionnary idea. Received highly experimental, potentially revolutionnary shitposting instead. I'm happy with that answer. Thanks for sharing

Welcome back, I'd like to understand your line of thought in detail. Please explain.

Yes, but actually no. https://unitgame.com/about_us.html Still, making a pull request on APB's public repo would definitely be somewhere on my life's bucket list.

A monument for all devs to remember, despite the tremendous talent of the team, there is no such thing as "Too big to fail".

Former employee analyzing how Realtime Worlds went bankrupt. https://web.archive.org/web/20200814025847/https://lukehalliwell.wordpress.com/category/realtime-worlds/

Nothing prevents another company to make a spiritual successor under a different IP (Besides the sheer amount of manpower required to make a game of this scale).

The maps, models for cars & guns, animations & textures could be exported to a new engine. There would be some heavy lifting to be done regarding all the custom code: Character creation, Symbols, Clothing a.k.a. skinning, LODs, physics... maybe even network... Starting from scratch would be best, but there is so much to do... If a "10-devs or less" team could update this game engine in 4 years by themselves, I'd be impressed.

It is just another side effect of a stagnant active population. Veterans & hardcore players optimize everything to win, and end up scaring new players / solos / casuals away. Nothing new here. Enforcing solo matchmaking would indeed make matchmaking teams fairer (More possible combinations of solo player rankings), but you would probably futher kill the game population, lower the matchmaking sample size and make things worse. You simply can't matchmake fairly an instance with 10/10 pop and ensure players find a match within 5 minutes. I'd agree with this. Create instances where grouping is impossible, and calling backup is the only way to construct a team. I think this was planned in the matchmaking rework with instance phasing. Grouping would only be possible in Social. The team gets attached an historical or sum of individual ratings. You then phase that group to the district with the appropriate team battle ratings. That would ensure full premades, duos or solos quickly find matches on a comparable scale.

Anyone has a recording of old APB Twitch stream, when Tiggs used the server-side spectate feature? It was a sight to behold. My jaw dropped as low as its FPS. It is simply not good enough to judge between a closet or a legit player (at that time). Monitoring GMs cost alot in the long run, even if you outsource this work to some 3rd world offshore company. You want to rely on automated anomaly detection tools. This game has too many security design oversights to prevent cheating.

Glad to see someone gets it. The engine update was needed for console deployment mostly. Having a unified codebase also allows devs to send updates more confidently and faster. In the backstage, it's still Unreal 3.5. Cheat makers already have no difficulty to hook onto it, and we'll be back to the good ol' signature-based detection that is actually worse than FairFight.

Also true

This game was very ambitious at the time. It's so ambitious that no one in the gamedev industry even tried to reproduce it, yet. I'm eager to see someone try with modern development tools.

Imagine if the devs went live with that idea :

50m is not terrible. Tap-fired at the proper rate, that thing was a monster.